Moving Beyond Fake News: Engaging Structural and Personal Factors as Students Learn to Evaluate Online Information (Poster 20)

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

As divisive misinformation proliferates online, our decisions about what to trust depend on our strategies for judging reliability as well as on our understanding of how online structures and personal beliefs influence what we see and how we react. However, existing research-based efforts to teach online evaluations focus on the former while largely neglecting the latter. How might teachers help students reflect on how online architectures and personal beliefs shape their evaluations? I will present initial results from a year-long curriculum development and professional development project in which I partnered with teams of high school social studies teachers to teach online evaluations. We worked to design lessons that more fully represented the reality of online evaluations. We taught evaluation strategies and also supported students to understand how structural and personal factors mediate evaluations. Based on initial analyses of lesson artifacts and observations, I will present an overview of our approach to designing the lessons and describe elements of lesson design that may have supported and hindered our overall goals. Students spend hours online every day, often bombarded by emotionally and politically charged content. This study presents ideas about how teachers might begin preparing students for this immense challenge.

Author

• Sarah McGrew, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author